Steve McIntyre: Phew, it's been a busy time lately. It's time I gave you an update on what I've been up to.
Hey folks,

Phew, it's been a busy time lately. It's time I gave you an update onwhat I've been up to.

Interviews———-I've spoken to quite a few journalists in the lastmonth. You've probably already seen/heard some of these elsewhere, butjust in case you haven't:

* A general interview for ITWire in Australia [1]. * Another general discussion with ComputerWorldUK [2]. * A weird(!) interview with ZDNet where the journalist seemed to care mostly about how Debian makes money [3]. * I also had a phone interview with a writer from the Register in the UK – some of it summarised in [4], related to [5]. * I spoke with Patrick Davila on the Linux Link Tech Show, a New York based Linux radio show [6].

I hope that I'm coming across OK in the press so far; there are a fewmore people talking to me about future interviews as well.

Delegations———–I'm not planning to compete with Sam for bombshells in terms ofdelegations, but I do have news on this front. I've already announcedthat Christoph Berg has joined the DAM team [7].

I'm also announcing today that Jonathan McDowell has been added to thekeyring maintenance team. He will continue working with James Troup onadding/removing keys as needed, and they are setting up procedureswith DSA to allow for easy integration with our LDAP database. Thebest way to ask for key updates is to use rt.debian.org as previouslyannounced[8]. I'm sure (prod!) that Jonathan will tell us more abouthis plans soon.

I'm hoping to announce even more delegation updates in the nearfuture; I'll let you know as I have more news.

We've also seen other personnel changes in core teams lately. Shortlyafter the DPL handover, Anthony Towns stepped down from most of theteams where he was a member [9]. He's been a valuable contributor forseveral years, and I hope he'll be back soon. Andreas Barth has alsorelinquished his Release Manager powers, passing them on to MarcBrockschmidt [10]. I want to publically thank Andi for his dedicationand huge efforts to date as an RM, and I know he'll be continuing tohelp as a Release Wizard for a while to come.

Teams review————You'll hopefully have found it difficult to miss me starting on thereview of teams that I promised during my DPL election campaign. Ispammed a lot of our lists with a survey [11] to ask for views on howour teams are working, and I've had lots of responses so far. Thanksfor those! There is still some time remaining until the submissionsdeadline of 23:59:59 UTC, Sunday 25th May; if you haven't told meabout your team workings yet, please get back to me *soon*.

To further help me get an idea of how some of our teams areresponding, I've also been given an account with extra access tort.debian.org so that I can see all the queues and tickets.

Summer of Code 2008——————-We've again been selected as a mentoring organisation for Google'sSummer of Code programme [12]. They're funding 12 students to work onprojects with us this summer. Hopefully this will lead to some giidsuccessful projects and some reall enthusiastic new contributors forus.

Debconf coming soon!——————–Preparations are still ongoing for Debconf 8 in Mar del Plata,Argentina [13]. There should be announcements soon from the team aboutpapers, talks and sponsorship. As always, we're also still looking formore companies and individuals to sponsor the conference – pleasecontact sponsors@debconf.org if you can help. I'm looking forwards tomeeting even more of our developers and users in August – see youthere!

Lenny—–Work is still ongoing, with some large transitions in process rightnow. D-I is progressing towards another beta release soon, whichshould also be the basis of the (slightly delayed) Etch and a Halfupdate. There's still plenty of work to be done before Lenny isready. Let's all pull together and we can make it happen. There aremore BSPs planned in the next few months too; I'll let the ReleaseTeam announce them as plans are finalised.

And finally, openssl…———————–We've all been hit by the openssl problem that was announced a coupleof days ago [14]. There has been a lot of press about it, and many ofus have had a lot of work to do to re-secure our servers. Please trynot to be too negative about it; we can all make mistakes. One of ourstrengths, and one of the reasons why our users like and trust us somuch, is that we don't try to hide our problems. I have seen a fewsuggestions of how to increase the amount of review our patches aregetting and how to improve our processes. Let's see what we can do tolearn from this and do better in the future.